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Esoteric Protestantism
"Esoteric Protestant groups like the Rosicrucians, Freemasonry, the Golden Dawn, and, indeed, the collective of scientists that became the Royal Society—are the esoteric core of Protestantism. Protestantism’s often aggressively “bland” approach, even approaching open secularism in the case of many modern denominations, makes it easy to assume that it possesses no depth and to miss what is (or at least was) hiding in plain sight. The primary formulation of this tradition can be traced to the sack of Constantinople and the transfer of Byzantine manuscripts containing material from ancient Greece and Rome to the Medici city-states. Here, the spiritual ideas of the ancient, pre-Christian world were revived as Renaissance Hermeticism and Neoplatonism, mixing with teachings on the Kabbalah from Europe’s Jews. This amalgam was in turn formulated into a system of “operative magic” by the Benedictine abbot Trithemius and his student Cornelius Agrippa. These streams of magical thought were prevalent in Europe at the time of Luther’s spiritual revolution and England’s subsequent “Brexit” from Rome, which permanently altered the spiritual politics of the West and was widely thought to indicate that the Apocalypse was at hand. Against this backdrop of impending Armageddon, these Hermetic, Neoplatonic, Cabalistic, and occult ideas and techniques came together in the singular personage of John Dee, who purportedly used them to contact angels. These angels immediately began using Dee, Kelly, and many of their noble and ecclesiastical connections to accelerate Europe even further toward the end times. In order to assist this process, Dee was given the “true” system of magic that earlier Renaissance thinkers had only really made a patchwork approximation of. While Luther had proposed a break with Rome, and Henry actualized it in England, Dee created the plan for global Protestant victory over the Church—a worldwide Empire of Angels, with Elizabeth I, not the pope, as its spiritual and political head. Such a global Protestant hegemony would pave the way toward the Second Coming, and central to actualizing this plan was Dee’s angelic system of magic. The overthrow of the old Roman order was not accomplished with the single nail hammered through the Ninety-Five Theses. The revolt undertaken by Martin Luther (whose personal seal, we should not forget, was a Rose Cross, and whose later Lutheran churches included the Eye of Providence or “eye in the pyramid” in their iconography) was pushed to completion by generations of Europeans often working in secret and under penalty of torture and death. Central to this struggle was not only Dee’s work but the Rosicrucian and Freemasonic movements that drew inspiration from it and were concerned with establishing a new era of intellectual, scientific, and spiritual freedom away from the stultifying grasp of Rome. These secret societies were the explicit counterpart of the Jesuits and other activist Holy Orders in Catholicism—in short, they were the Protestant special forces. Their ideals were concretized as modern science, via the Royal Society, and as the country of America, via Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and the efforts of the Masonic founding fathers of America. I propose that this Esoteric Protestantism may be broadly defined by two goals: One is the emphasis on individual salvation—not just through the standard five solae of Protestantism, but by direct experiment in the alteration of consciousness through alchemy and even ritual magic, with the goal being the restoration of man’s individual fallen state. The second is the extension of this process to the entire planet, via the acceleration of the events of Revelation by human agency. As demonstrated above, this eschatological push, following the late nineteenth century, became the defining feature of Protestantism, especially in America." + Protestantism; Western Esotericism; Esotericism; Tradition; Deep History